When I started, some 40 years ago, to move in European circles, I was stunned to realise that words and concepts had such different meanings in other languages eg “accountability”, “Chancellor” let alone “local government” and “democracy”!
The more I listened to the simultaneous translation, the more amazed I was that there could be any mutual understanding – and that was before the Wall fell and the central and south-eastern Europeans were suddenly exposed to strange concepts of capitalism, democracy and multiple variants thereof. And it’s not just that our talk reverbates in different ways – the very way we think is also so very different according to people such as Richard Nesbitt. Johan Galtung wrote an important paper as long ago as 1981 in which he analysed the different intellectual styles of the Saxons, French, German and Japanese. These days he would think twice before venturing into this territory.
A post last week mentioned that I was working on a paper trying to make sense of various terms such as “political culture”, “world values” and “cultural theory” which go back almost 100 years to the 1930s as anthropology became a discipline to be reckoned with, producing academics of the stature of Frans Boas, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and Mary Douglas. The second world war produced a demand for anthropological understanding – although the Frankfurt School social psychologists were also involved in the interpretation of Nazism. But it was not until the 1950s that the political scientists muscled in.
1968 saw a values revolution – a famous author actually used the phrase “narcissistic” – although others called it “post-materialism”. The idea of national cultural traits was never a fashionable one in academic circles – there was always something a bit embarrassing about it. But, from the 1990s, it became very acceptable as business globalised and popular interest has never waned.
As I mentioned in the previous post, since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have these past couple of weeks developed into a 30 page paper which is almost finished - and I’m previewing here
The core of the paper consists of some 50 books in the field on which I’ve made brief notes and structured into 3 tables to make the reading easier.
As I waded through the reading for the paper, certain books made more sense to me than others – they just seemed better at explaining things. I’ve picked these out for a final table – there are nine of them.
And I make an amazing discovery – four of them focus on an issue which is not one of the terms with which I started this inquiry, that of VALUES. And, furthermore, “Political Culture” ties with “Values” – also with four, with “Cultural Theory” coming in with only one representative. Now this could simply reflect the fact that they are all (with the exception of the final EC document) much better written than the World Values Survey material which does tend to be heavy on statistics and verbal pomposity
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